Malchome's Mind on Gaming

First I want to say that some of my impression and or complaints that I may list here could just be that I missed some interface setting that does what I want but don’t know where it is located or what order of clicks I have to press to get it to do what I want.

Actually that really is the first thing that is lacking, I know it is a beta and they want to balance the game however a nice short single player tutorial would have been nice.  It does not even need to have story just a series of demos of basic features that are most likely stable.  As in build queues, creating/canceling.  What rally points do for different units.  If it is a gathering unit you can rally to a resource node and it will automatically collect.  Which I guess my have been obvious if you were are Star Craft fanatic, come to think of it WC3 may have had this but I don’t remember, it was not something that stood out.

Since a lot of beta codes went out to completely or equivalent of completely new players from Blizzcon and other sources an introductory tutorial would have been greatly appreciated.  Rather than just throwing us to the wolves of the fanatics.

I will have more to say but I want to contemplate them a bit more and play some more before finalizing my thoughts on a few different topics.  There was thread in the beta forums where a player was saying that the philosophy behind units seems to be off between the 3 races.  Well more Protoss and Zerg.  The zerg are suppose to be cheap throw away units that die quickly but their are tons of them.  That does not seem to be the case.  Where as the Protoss have very expensive units that should do a lot of damage and have good amounts of armor but they seem to crumple when you actually hit them with anything.  It is still beta but it feels like the races are going in the wrong direction for some reason given the background of the current SC universe.

First I want to apologize to those of you that have occasionally come back to my blog.  I had a lot of ideas percolating and then got swamped in IRL work related stuff.  Such that when I did have time to blog I chose to play a variety of games instead to relax.   Anyway I need to stop doing coming soon threads as I am not very good at actually writing the ideas up in a timely manner.

So what have I been up too in the mean time.  In no particular order.

• Playing Star Craft 2, Beta – hopefully more on this soon or later.
• Playing EVE Online again, the lure of planetary exploration/exploitation in the next expansion was enough to get me back in until the expansion.  How the systems actually work will determine whether I stick around.
• Leveling more Alts, yes this time they are Horde though.  I want to get through the starting areas of each race which I essentially have now and get through Outlands and Northrend quests/lore before Cataclysm.  There is the 45-60 part of the horde questing I have not done yet either and will need to get at least 1 character through that section.
• Got a new computer so can run dual monitors and 2 WoW clients at 30FPS+ in Dalaran with graphics setting at max.  It looks like a new game.  Like I went from Warcraft to Warcraft 2 or 2->3.  But with this beast I also will be able to run one client and have a development studio open while restarting a second client without wanting to stab my eyes out at the lag.  So I may slowly get into mod development or at least making patches to my own mods when they generate errors.  If something interesting develops out of this, here is where I would post initial information.

Well that brings us to the present.  I hope to have a few short posts “soon” lol.

Well looking at my google analytics my 3 main sources of traffic are Warrior Macros, Restokin and Feed readers.  So my next few posts will have something to do with Macros, Druids and most likely the Auction House again.  I also want to discuss how I really think Cataclysm will be the best version of this game yet given several of the things mentioned about gear/stats and tanking/healing changes.

Anyway this was just a quick FYI post.

The Deathbringer Saurfang fight changes are complete and total Bullshit.

As Daelo says on the forums the strategy that most raids are implementing is not how Blizzard wants us to play.  Ok the strategy with letting the first and or second person to get the Mark of the Fallen champion dying is not an exploit.  Blizzard can say it is but all in all it is just understanding how numbers work and resetting the counter at the expense of letting a member die, bet it a healer or dps, which can really hurt.

Now I started to write this post prior to the hot-fix.  But this is not something to let drop.  Especially since the hot fix was pushed out in prime time and caused a bit of server lag.  Yay Blizz screws up an encounter and then makes the server unplayable but still live to push out the hot fix, yes it only lasted for about 15 minutes the lag that is but still it would have been better to just give a 15 minute warning and do rolling restarts.  so that you don’t get penalized yet again in another fight.

All of this could have been avoided if 1 of the following things had happened.

1. There was a PTR build with the fight change and the difficulty and blood power gains could have been evaluated.
2. Blizzard quit acting like a kindergartner out on the playgrounds changing the rules every time they see something they don’t like.
3. If you are going to changes the rules you had better damn well make sure it is conveyed to the public i.e. PATCH NOTES PEOPLE PATCH NOTES!

If you don’t like how people are adapting to the mechanics/rules you put in place then be more careful next time but completely changing the dynamics of a fight after it has gone live, other than a simple bug fix, is complete BS.  If you want encounters to adjust to how players are adapting to the mechanics then the mechanics need to be more dynamic in the first place.  But then every fight would become like the Faction Champions and that would just be annoying as hell.

Also since initially starting this post when I was pissed off in raid last night due to the Saurfang fight.  I recently saw that Ensidia’s 25 man kill has been retconned because they were using items that bugged the fight.

Now for the most part I hate Ensidia and the like.  I don’t really give a damn about World/Country/Server firsts.  However if combat log parses show that as they claim some of their dps use the bombs in question regularly as part of their rotation then the action Blizzard has taken against them is BS.  I have used BS a lot in this post but I am refraining from using stronger expletives to express my dissatisfaction and disbelief at the pathetic actions Blizzard is taking in these instances.

The bomb bug is inexcusable in reaching live.  To put it simply Blizzard has all the information and the ability to test everything in their game.  They have logs of information raid leaders could only dream about.   Well I hope they do anyway.  In a test instance they could set a players life to 10M and let the mob hit the player forever and a day if need be they could then go through a list of every expected item that could be used in the encounter and check to makes sure it performs as expected.  Any Engineering item created in this expansion should be well within the expected bounds of items to be used by min/max twinks like the top end raiding guilds.

But then again we really should not be surprised.  Blizzard has a track record of punishing players for creativity and using the tools given to them.

So in the end my only suggestion on how to avoid this in the future is if Blizzard is going to punish us for creativity and adapting to the mechanics of the fight then they need to release an Official strategy to be used with each fight so we know what we are allowed to do in each instance.

I apologize for some of the negativity that is contained in this post, I usually try to look for ways to improve things and not just bitch and moan in general.  However changing the rules of how something works once it goes live regardless of whether some or all of the changes are then rolled back is inexcusable in a production environment.

By now the news has spread the Blizzard will eventually implement in game Auction House(AH) Access into the Armory, the signed in portion of course. I saw it mentioned first on mmo-champion which points to a WoW Forums post.

I think this is a really cool idea, I won’t be using this feature most of the time, but definitely something I will be using at other times. Especially since theoretically you could be on 1 character of the account and check the AH on other servers and or the Bank Alt of the same account. But they may put something in place such that is that account is logged into the game no character on that account could be checked. We will have to see.

Over all I like this idea but lets be serious the current AH in game feels like a quick fix that was added at the last moment to at least have some sort of an in-game economy going. The default interface is a pain in the ass and even with Auctioneer and other Add-ons it is still extremely tedious and a bitch to find stuff if you are just browsing. If you know exactly what you want it works otherwise it fails.

Out of the 4 in game AH like interfaces I have dealt with directly and several, more than 3, others I have heard about only 1 stands out as actually being something different, robust and useful.  EVE-Online is the only MMO I have seen that actually has a robust and useful economic interface.  I believe it is this way because, crafting and the economic game are actually acceptable play styles in EVE.  Whereas in all of the other MMOs I have dealt with and heard about those systems, crafting and trading, seem to be a quick fix to add features.

So what am I suggesting or IMO is needed. A complete overhaul of the AH. Yes our bag space may be limited by stack size but why the hell should the AH. The AH like everything in the game is ultimately a series of entries in a Database. Currently it seems like 1 entry in said DB has a stack size limitation. This is insane.

The following are IMO the way to make the AH sing.

• 1 entry in the AH per Item of unlimited quantity (ultimately an unsigned Int of either 8/16/32bit in size. 16 would be the best since dust and some rep items could get into the hundreds easily.)
• The biggest and most important one,  list Buy Orders
• Fully customizable search for gear.
• Wild Card Search-able for Name Text
• iLvL
• eLvL
• Quality(Pick-able, not Lowest filter.) If I want to find a green item I want to see green, not green, blue, and purple.
• Stat Search X [<|>|=] of Y Stat [Str|Agil|Stam|Int|Spr|SP|AP|Armor|Crit|Hit|Haste|ect....] Repeatable so add additional filters.
• Price History (at least past week) so we can in game see the price trends over the past week. (Min, Max, Avg) of both Price listed and Price Sold. Maybe a separate graph showing # sold at what price through Bid and Buyout.

Essentially look at what EVE-Online has for an in game economic interface and make something similar with the Blizzard polish, because I really can’t think of any way to really improve the EVE interface, I just know that I like it and it would be great to have something similar in WoW. Unfortunately for EVE it is about the only thing I really like in the game but I will save my dislikes of EVE for another post sometime.